You have heard the word covenant many times, and there is a temptation to think of it as just one of those Bible words. But the word covenant means something. In fact, it means many things, and one of the important ones has direct relevance to the make up of our congregation.
Because we are bound together by covenant, and not by ideology, this means that there should be a bunch of people here who would not be gathered together in one place under any other circumstance. The covenant helps us fight the natural “birds of a feather” tendency.
When people gather in churches because of what they have in common, the result is clusters of rich people, or narrow doctrinal people, or young people, or old people, or hipster people. When the covenant binds us together, it should delight you that a toddler grandchild and his grandparents lift their arms at the Gloria Patri at the same moment. When the covenant binds us together, it is one of our glories that this is something that could never happen in a country club. Our ties are not socio-economic.
As we are being restored in our covenantal understanding, we need to do so understanding that we are living in a day which is fragmented precisely because of a loss of covenantal understanding. There have been eras when it was possible for multiple generations to worship together, and to do so in a way that was simply cultural—but this era is not one of them. Many generations of one family have been “birds of a feather” in other times, but not now. The secular world is doing everything it can to separate us by generations, instead of allowing it to be through obedience to the fifth commandment.
So as we cultivate a renewed covenantal understanding in our midst, this will be profoundly reformational . . . which means that it will not be easy.